CLOSELY connected with
the questions just discussed is that of the founding of the Church; for the Apostles
were the organs through whom the religious community which originated in Christ
was to be handed down to after ages, the connecting links that were to unite it
with its Founder. A clear conception of the idea of the Church, in comparison with
what we have said of the plan of Christ, will make it obvious that he intended to
establish the Church, and himself laid its foundation.

By the Church we understand
a union of men arising from the fellowship (communion) of religious life; a union
essentially independent of, and different from, all other forms of human association.
It was a fundamental element of the formation of this union, that religion was no
longer to be inseparably bound up, either as principal or subordinate, with the
political and national relations of men, but that it should develop itself, by
its own inherent energy, as a principle of culture and union; superior, in its very
essence, to all human powers. This involved both the power and the duty to create
an independent community, and that community is the Church.

And Christianity is
proved to be the aim and object of all human progress, not only by the craving for
redemption, which no man can deny, in human nature, but also by the very idea of
such a community as the Church, which overthrows all natural barriers, and binds
mankind together by a union founded on the common alliance of their nature to
God. The spirit of humanity, feeling itself confined by
the limits which the opposing interests of nations impose upon it, demands a communion
that shall overleap these barriers, and lay its foundations only in the consciousness,
common to all men, of their relation to the Highest—a relation transcending the
world and nature. Apart from Christianity, indeed, we could not conceive the idea
of such a communion; but now that Christianity has freed Reason from the old-world
bonds that hindered its developement, and unfolded for it a higher self-consciousness,
there can be no science of human nature that does not reckon this communion as the
aim of human progress, that does not assign to the Church its proper place in the
universal moral organism of humanity. Schleiermacher has done this in his
“Philosophical
Ethics,” and has thus found, in the Church, the point of departure for Christian
morals. And so every system of ethics must do which
123is not willing to fall in the rear of human progress, and to be guilty
of cruelly mutilating the nature of man. Nay, the minds of the sages who sought
to break through the limits of the ancient world yearned for this idea long before
its realization in Christianity. Zeno,187187 In his work, περὶ πολιτείας.
the founder of the Stoa, proclaimed it as the highest of human aims, that “men
should not be separated by cities, states, and laws, but that all should be
considered fellow-citizens, and partakers of one life, and that the whole world,
like a united flock, should be governed by one common law.”188188Ἵνα μὴ κατὰ
πόλεις, μηδὲ κατὰ δήμους οἰκῶμεν, ἰδιόις ἕκαστοι διωρισμένοι δικαίοις, ἀλλὰ πάντας
ἀνθρώπους ἡγώμεθα δημότας καὶ πολίτας, εἶς δὲ βίος ᾖ καὶ κόσμος ὥσπερ ἀγέλης συννόμου νομῷ κοινῷ
συντρεφομένης. Plut. in Alex., i., c. vi.
Plutarch, who quotes these words, was probably right in saying that “Zeno had
some phantom of a dream before him when he wrote;”189189Τοῦτο Ζήνων μὲν ἔγραψεν ὥστερ ὄναρ
ἢ εἲδωλον ευνομίας φιλοσόφου καὶ πολιτείας ἀνατυπωσάμενος
for how could an idea, so far transcending the spirit of antiquity, be realized
in its sphere? Such a communion could only be brought about, at that time, by
the destruction of the separate organization of nations, to the detriment of
their natural and individual progress; and the very event in which Plutarch
thought he saw its fulfilment, viz., the commingling of the nations by
Alexander’s190190 To whom he applies what can only be said of Christ: κοινὸς
ἥκειν θεόθεν
ἀρμοστὴς καὶ διαλλακτὴς τῶν
ὅλων νομίζων. conquests, carried the germ of self-destruction within
it. A total revolution of the ancient world necessarily had to precede the realizing
of this idea. Mankind had to be freed from the power of sin, and the disjunctive
and repulsive agency of sin, before there could be any place for this Divine communion
of life, which overleaps, without destroying, the natural divisions of nations.
And this is the realization of the idea of the Church.

Now as this revolution could
only be brought about by Him who was at once Son of God
and Son of Man, so He, when he recognized himself as the Saviour and King bestowed
upon mankind, was fully conscious, also, of his power to realize this idea. It is
clear, from what we have said of the Plan of Christ, that the results which were
to flow in after ages from the indwelling power of the Word proclaimed and sent
forth by him to regenerate and unite mankind, lay fully revealed before his all-surveying
glance. He knew that it contained the elements of a spiritual community that would
burst asunder the confining forms of the Jewish Theocracy, and take all mankind
into its wide embrace.